Environmentalists have their work cut out for them these days, as they struggle to confront threats like global warming and mass species extinction and the human population continues to grow.

High Country News correspondent Ben Goldfarb writes about a tool that could help make environmental protection more attractive, even to the businesses already responsible for so much environmental damage.

Nelson Harvey spoke with Goldfarb about this idea for the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK's collaboration with High Country News.

]]>No publisherSounds of the High CountryAudioMultimediaThe Future2015/01/20 13:52:51 GMT-6ArticleLight rail exists in Denver, and comes to Phoenixhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/sounds-of-the-high-country-light-rail-in-phoenix
Nelson Harvey takes a ride on Denver’s light rail to see whether it’s changed his city for the better.In a recent issue of High Country News, senior editor Jonathan Thompson explores whether light rail systems can transform the sprawling, car-centric cities of the Western U.S. For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK Radio's collaboration with High Country News, Nelson Harvey took a ride on Denver’s light rail to see whether it’s changed his newly adopted city for the better.

]]>No publisherSounds of the High CountryAudioMultimediaGrowth & SustainabilityArizonaColoradoTransportationNot on homepage2014/12/01 13:10:00 GMT-6ArticleColorado’s first legal hemp harvest since 1957 is underwayhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/colorados-first-legal-hemp-harvest-since-1957-is-underway
But a ban on seed transport hampers farmers. Boosters of industrial hemp often fondly refer to the plant as a wonder crop, usable in everything from building materials to batteries to breakfast cereal. Since Colorado voters legalized both hemp and marijuana with the passage of Amendment 64 in 2012, hemp advocates have been buzzing about the state’s promise as a manufacturing hub for this dizzying array of products. Yet even as Colorado farmers make history this fall with the first legal commercial hemp harvest on U.S. soil in 57 years, it’s unlikely that much of their bounty will go toward the plant’s diverse list of potential uses.

Instead, hobbled by a longstanding federal ban on shipping hemp seed across state lines, most Colorado hemp farmers are squirreling away their seed supply, using this year’s harvest as a source of next year’s supply in an attempt to vastly increase planted acreage in 2015 with Colorado-grown seed stock.

“In an ideal world we’d grow between 1,500 and 2,000 acres of hemp next year, said J.R. Knaub, a 37-year-old farmer in the northeastern Colorado town of Sterling who has been growing corn, sugar beets and alfalfa for the last 20 years and this year planted around 2 acres of hemp. “But getting seed will be the biggest task we have to conquer.”

The federally-induced seed shortage has already stunted the growth of Colorado’s hemp industry: Last spring, farmers registered with the Colorado Department of Agriculture to plant nearly 1,600 acres of hemp. Yet seed shortages, poor germination rates and inexperience with the crop will limit their harvest this fall to about 200 acres, according to Zev Paiss of the Rocky Mountain Hemp Association.

“This year, because it was so hard to get seed, people were buying whatever they could get a hold of, and it wasn’t always the best seed,” said Paiss. “Because of that, I’ve heard that the amount of germination farmers achieved varied widely.”

In light of the shortage, Colorado hemp farmers appear to be prioritizing seed saving this fall over other potential uses for their hemp crops. The state Department of Agriculture requires hemp farmers to submit a form at least 30 days before harvest detailing what they plan to do with their plants, and as of late September, 27 farmers had written that they plan to use their crop primarily for seed saving purposes. Just 14 farmers had plans to experiment with making construction materials, textiles, medicines and other hemp-based products, and only one farmer planned to sell seed to other growers this fall. (As this story was published, “harvest notification” forms continued to roll in from farmers around the state).

“We are at the very beginning of rebuilding a complicated industry,” said Paiss. “All the farmers are going to be holding on to their seed this year and building seed stock. There will be almost no seed available for sale to new businesses [next] year.”

The federal ban on hemp has its roots in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The act made it illegal to transport the plant or its seeds across state lines without a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which can be hard to get. Since Colorado voters legalized industrial hemp in 2012, farmers have found ways to import seed from other countries, but many are reluctant to discuss the details of those legally nebulous arrangements. Plus, there’s no guarantee that seeds they import from hemp producing nations like Canada and China will successfully clear U.S. Customs.

There are cracks forming in the façade of federal hemp prohibition: The 2014 farm bill contained a provision allowing colleges and universities to cultivate industrial hemp for research purposes without fear of federal interference, and 19 states have laws on the books permitting such pilot projects, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Eight of those states, including Colorado, California, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont and West Virginia have passed laws removing barriers to more widespread hemp production.

If Colorado farmers can save hemp seed successfully this fall, the acreage planted there next spring should grow substantially from this year’s levels. Paiss says that the seed saved from two acres of industrial hemp should be enough to plant at least 20 acres next year, which he says is a conservative estimate. Bill Billings, the president of an eastern Colorado company called the Colorado Hemp Project, says depending on the hemp variety and production methods, an acre worth of seed could be enough for 100 acres next year. Even if the ban on seed transport persists, farmers will likely continue smuggling seed from abroad next year to supplement what they can grow themselves.

And despite the seed shortage, there are some plans afoot to use part of this year’s hemp harvest for research and development — it is possible, after all, to save some seed while putting the rest of the plant to immediate use. Over the next few years, Colorado entrepreneurs are hoping to build processing plants to make hemp-based pharmaceuticals, textiles, energy drinks and myriad other products.

Billings says he’s working with a Boulder, Colorado-based company to develop hemp-based carbon electrodes for batteries and other applications that could make expensive materials like graphene unnecessary. Ryan Laughlin, the farmer who harvested a much-publicized hemp crop on his Springfield, Colorado farm in 2013 before state hemp regulations were finalized, is selling this year’s harvest to Cannabis Therapy Corp. of Boulder, which makes hemp and cannabis-based pharmaceuticals. And a firm called American Hemp Ventures recently won approval to build an experimental hemp processing plant in Logan County in the eastern part of the state.

Over time, the hope is to replace many imported hemp products with domestically produced alternatives. “Right now we import $580 million per year in hemp products into the U.S.,” said Paiss. “We are talking about tapping into a half-billion dollar industry over the next few years.

Nelson Harvey is a freelance reporter and contributor to High Country News. Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Bill Billings estimated one acre of hemp seed could be used to plant 400 acres, when in fact he meant 100 acres could be planted. We regret the error.

]]>No publisherAgricultureColoradoPoliticsEconomy2014/10/02 09:45:00 GMT-6ArticleKDNK speaks with HCN reporter John Calderazzohttp://www.hcn.org/articles/kdnk-radio-speaks-with-hcn-reporter-john-calderazzo
Scientists who study climate change can be remarkably bad at communicating findings.Scientists who study climate change are generally brilliant people, but they can also be remarkably bad at communicating their findings to the general public.

That communication failure, some say, has contributed to the fact that many Americans don’t buy the scientific consensus that human activity is to blame for most of the climate change we’ve seen in recent decades.

In an essay in the current issue of High Country News, John Calderazzo explores the idea that better storytelling by scientists could trigger a shift in U.S. public opinion on climate change.

Nelson Harvey examined that notion for the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s collaboration with High Country News.

]]>No publisherSounds of the High CountryMultimediaAudioEssaysBooks & Essays2014/09/26 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleKDNK speaks with HCN reporter Claudine LoMonacohttp://www.hcn.org/articles/kdnk-radio-speaks-with-claudine-lamonaco
On troubling corporate and Forest Service conduct in Arizona. What if a government agency awarded nearly $300 million worth of work to a totally unqualified company simply to enrich former colleagues and anger political enemies?

In her cover story in a recent issue of High Country News, investigative reporter Claudine LoMonaco shows that the U.S. Forest Service may have done just that in 2012 with the contract for the Four Forest Restoration Project—also called the Four Fry Project—in Arizona.

For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s collaboration with High Country News, Nelson Harvey spoke to HCN LoMonaco about the troubling implications of what she found.

Nelson’s interview barely scratched the surface of the troubling corporate and governmental conduct that Claudine LoMonaco uncovered in her reporting on the Four Forest Restoration Project.

In fact, she discovered that the project’s current contractor, who took over from Pioneer Associates when they couldn’t find investors, may also have misled the government in their project proposal.]]>No publisherPublic LandsSounds of the High CountryMultimediaAudioU.S. Forest Service2014/09/21 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleClimate threats to Alaska food securityhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-threats-to-alaska-food-security
KDNK speaks with HCN writer Elizabeth Grossman. Human caused climate change can seem like an abstract global problem, but when it begins to affect our food supply things get real, real quick.

For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s collaboration with the magazine HCN, Nelson Harvey spoke to writer Elizabeth Grossman about how native Alaskan tribes are seeing their wild food sources undermined by a changing climate. Grossman's story "Alaska's uncertain food future" appeared in a recent print issue of HCN.

You can find past editions of this podcast at KDNK.org or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesMultimediaAudio2014/08/20 09:15:00 GMT-6ArticleTo protect hydropower, utilities will pay Colorado River water users to conservehttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/doi-and-utilities-partner-to-stave-off-colorado-river-power-woes
Here’s a sure sign that your region’s in drought: you stop paying your utility for the privilege of using water, and the utility starts paying you not to use water instead.

Outlandish as it sounds, that’s what four major Western utilities and the federal government are planning to do next year through the $11 million Colorado River Conservation Partnership. Under the agreement, finalized late last week between the Department of Interior and the utilities Denver Water, the Central Arizona Project, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, farmers, cities and industries will get paid to implement two-year, voluntary conservation projects that put water back into the Colorado River. The goal is to demonstrate that so-called “demand management” can prevent water levels in lakes Powell and Mead from dropping too low for their dams to generate electricity.

“We want to demonstrate how we can live within our means on the river,” said Jim Lochhead, CEO of Denver Water, whose city relies on Colorado River water piped east over the Continental Divide for about half of its water supply.

In the agricultural sphere, one candidate for funding under the partnership would be rotational fallowing agreements, where farmers band together, dry up some of their land and leave the associated water in the river in dry years. Yet after years of Western cities “buying and drying” nearby farms to lubricate their growth, agricultural groups are eager to see other non-fallowing options explored as well.

A modeling exercise completed by the Bureau of Reclamation in the summer of 2013 showed a 20 percent chance that Lake Powell could drop below &quot;minimum power pool&quot; by as early as next year, rendering Glen Canyon Dam incapable of producing electricity and potentially triggering involuntary water use reductions in the upper Colorado River Basin. Graphic courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation.

“Fallowing is really a blunt force tool that would harm agriculture,” said Terry Frankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. “We want to try to explore other ways of reducing demand,” like switching to less water intensive crops, watering less and accepting reduced yields, or water banking—foregoing diversions when you don’t need them in exchange for the right to use more later.

In cities, projects eligible for funding could include things like water-smart landscaping, increased use of reclaimed water, or efficiency standards for appliances and new construction.

Whatever the demand-reducing mechanism, Lochhead said, “The goal is to develop a plan that we can put into place as we need to in emergency situations.” And for water managers who depend on the Colorado River, losing power-generating capacity in lakes Mead and Powell would certainly qualify as an emergency. If water levels drop that low, there likely won’t be enough head pressure in Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam to push through 7.5 million acre feet of water over 10 years. That’s how much the upper basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—are required to deliver to the lower basin under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. If they fall short, the lower basin states—Arizona, Nevada and California—have license to place a call on the river and force their friends in the upper basin to cut consumption.

If the turbines inside Glen Canyon Dam ground to a halt, it could prompt power prices in the upper basin to spike.

“If that happens, it would mean chaos in the basin among water users because everyone would be scrambling to try to shore up our water supplies,” Lochhead said.

And losing power generating capacity could have other consequences: proceeds from the electricity generated at Glen Canyon Dam now fund recovery programs for four endangered species—the Kanab ambersnail, the razorback sucker, the humpback chub and the southwestern willow flycatcher—that are native to the Colorado River Basin. If enough water in Lake Powell evaporates, funding for those programs could too, allowing the federal government to intervene and curtail water use in the upper basin in the name of the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, if the turbines inside Glen Canyon Dam ground to a halt, Lochhead points out that it could prompt power prices in the upper basin to spike, since roughly 5.8 million people now depend on electricity from the dam for a portion of their power supply. Exactly how much rates would rise remains unclear.

So how real is the threat of losing power at lakes Mead and Powell? The waters of both reservoirs aren’t circling the drain just yet, but the prospect of either dropping below “minimum power pool” is hardly academic: modeling completed by the Bureau of Reclamation last year suggested that if the drought and water usage trends that prevailed in the basin between 2001 and 2007 continue through the end of this decade, there’s a one-in-five chance that both Mead and Powell could drop too low to generate power by 2017.

“The consequences of that are really pretty devastating,” said Lochhead. “We need to be ahead of that curve instead of being reactionary.”

Nelson Harvey is a freelance reporter and the editor of Edible Aspen Magazine.

]]>No publisherWaterRivers & LakesHydropowerColorado RiverDroughtEnergy & IndustrySouthwestBlog Post2014/08/04 11:55:00 GMT-6ArticleJonathan Thompson on payday lendinghttp://www.hcn.org/articles/jonathan-thompson-on-tribes-and-payday-lending
Latest chapter in the exploitation of Native Americans, with a surprising plot twist.It may not come as a surprise that many Native Americans living on mostly poor, remote reservations in the American West have come to rely heavily on payday loan companies offering cash at high interest rates when money is tight. Yet as Jonathan Thompson reveals in the current issue of High Country News, some tribes have also started getting into the payday lending business themselves, often by partnering with private companies and shielding them from state financial rules.

For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK Radio’s collaboration with the magazine, Nelson Harvey asked Thompson whether these tribes could be mortgaging their futures in exchange for quick cash.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesMultimediaAudio2014/07/02 10:33:07 GMT-6ArticleBorder patrol runs roughshod on public landshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/border-patrol-runs-roughshod-on-arizona-public-lands
KDNK speaks with Ray Ring about damage to border ecology. In its quest to secure the U.S./Mexico border, the U.S. Border Patrol is running roughshod over huge swaths of desert wilderness with complete immunity from U.S. environmental laws.

That’s what Ray Ring, a senior editor at High Country News, discovered on a recent reporting trip to the border for his feature story “Border Out of Control." For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK Radio’s collaboration with the magazine, Ring told Nelson Harvey about the tremendous environmental price we’re paying at the border, and why it’s tough to quantify what we’re getting in return.

]]>No publisherPoliticsMultimediaAudio2014/06/17 13:53:54 GMT-6ArticleWill gun control do more harm than good? http://www.hcn.org/articles/will-gun-control-do-more-harm-than-good
KDNK Radio speaks with HCN about the great gun debate. As Americans grapple with the best way to stem the tide of mass shootings that have terrorized the country in recent years, one liberal journalist and author is arguing that adding gun control laws could actually do more harm than good in the effort to make Americans safer.

In his recent book “Gun Guys: A Road Trip,” the self-described “liberal gun nut” Dan Baum argues that future shootings won’t be prevented by banning certain guns or shrinking ammunition magazines, but instead by partnering with responsible gun owners to promote a culture of safety.

Baum lays out his argument in the current issue of High Country News. For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s collaboration with the magazine, Nelson Harvey spoke to Baum about why guns are a symbol in the culture wars, what shooting sport enthusiasts have to worry about besides gun control, and how gun culture could be changed from the inside out.

Read Dan Baum’s High Country News essay “The Great Gun Rights Divide." Also find past editions of this podcast at KDNK.org or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesMultimediaAudio2014/06/02 15:42:30 GMT-6ArticleScientists turn to crowdfunding for fracking researchhttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/lack-of-government-money-for-fracking-research-got-you-down-crowdfund-it
A scientist from the University of Missouri who recently found elevated levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals in parts of Garfield County, Colo. where spills of wastewater from natural gas drilling occurred is now planning the second phase of her research, but with a surprising funding mechanism this time. Rather than seeking backing from government agencies or private foundations, Dr. Susan Nagel and her team are drumming up donations in the same way that many before them have started small businesses, made documentary films, or produced t-shirts adorned with images of Miley Cyrus twerking: they’re crowdfunding their research through a new website called Experiment.com.

Nagel’s crowdfunding attempt – she’s seeking $25,000, has raised about $11,000 since March 24 and has 36 days to go – represents at least the fourth time in recent years that U.S. scientists have turned to the general public for financial help researching the health effects of the gas drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking (which involves pumping a slurry of water, sand and chemicals into the ground to release oil or gas). Earlier this year, a team of researchers from the University of Washington raised $12,000 through Experiment.com to study how much gas drilling contributes to ozone in Utah’s Uinta Basin, and last year a team from Pennsylvania’s Juniata College raised $10,000 to examine the impact of fracking on stream ecology throughout the state. Another Experiment.com campaign by a University of Colorado biologist seeking to use microorganisms to see whether methane in drinking water came from fracking failed after falling short of its funding goal back in March.

Nagel’s own research centers on the link between fracking and endocrine disrupting chemicals, which either mimic or interfere with sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone and have been linked to cancer, infertility and behavioral and immune system disorders. In their recent study, Nagel and her colleagues tested 12 of the hundreds of chemicals commonly used in the fracking process and found that 11 of those tested had endocrine disrupting potential.Yet no research to date has shown definitively that fracking can result in damages to human health.

At a time when the government's own research on fracking is coming under fire from both sides of the political spectrum, industry-funded studies on the topic remain suspect and relatively little other financing for such research exists, crowdfunding is emerging as a way for some researchers to launch early stage work on the relationship between fracking, pollution and health.

Nagel said she was driven toward crowdfunding in part by the paucity of federal money for fracking research. “US EPA announced three years ago that they would be funding research about the safety of fracking,” wrote Nagel in an email, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “However, before they began accepting applications, that program was canceled. ” Though Nagel said the agency gave no explanation for that decision, she suspects the lack of federal funding for fracking research has political roots: the EPA has frequently been blasted by prominent Republican critics for its investigations into whether fracking pollutes drinking water, and President Barack Obama often cites the job-creating potential of the domestic oil and gas industry, whose parade would certainly be rained on by bad news about the health effects of drilling.

In phase two of her research, Nagel hopes to collect water samples from at least 30 Garfield County sites (she sampled from just seven in the first phase) and to measure endocrine disruptor levels in drilling dense areas where spills haven’t taken place. She also hopes to launch a comprehensive analysis of whether the hormone disrupting compounds she detects are some of the same ones used in the fracking process.

Nagel recently applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but after the scientists reviewing her application suggested several tweaks – recommending, for example, that she also test for hormones affecting the human thyroid gland – Nagel was forced to re-apply in the coming months and wait a year for the next round of NIH funding.

“Facing such a long delay, we decided to turn to crowdfunding to raise money in a much shorter period of time,” Nagel said.

The speed and flexibility of crowdfunding science is one of its main selling points, but Nagel still sees crowdfunding as more of a supplement to government research grants than a substitute.

“Our ultimate goal is to generate enough preliminary data [through crowdfunding] that we can get that NIH grant and be able to do this kind of research for years to come,” she says. “Experiment.com is filling a little niche there of funding preliminary research.”

Whether crowd-funded research is less susceptible to bias or influence peddling than work funded by industry – or even government – remains to be seen. It seems logical that a large and diverse donor pool would tend to dilute the influence of individual agendas: The University of Washington study of fracking and air quality, for instance, had 155 unique donors and the average donation was just $77.23 – hardly enough to bribe even an impoverished scientist.

Experiment.com also has a technical committee that reviews each research project before accepting it as a crowdfunding candidate: the group evaluates the validity of the research question, the scope and feasibility of the project, and the credentials of the scientist in charge.

Even so, if those who fund fracking research are primarily the people adversely affected by drilling or critical of the practice to begin with, could that put pressure on researchers to point fingers at the gas industry in their results?

Experiment.com spokeswoman Rebecca Searles doesn’t think so.

“You're right, there is definitely some bias in crowdfunding,” she wrote in an email. “People are more likely to fund research that they feel an emotional attachment to. But we actually think crowdfunding bias is an improvement over partial blind peer-review panels where the real bias is conflict of interest or politics or risk aversion or bureaucracy or ageism, etc. Crowdfunding, on the other hand, only requires that enough people care to see it happen.”

Nelson Harvey is a freelance reporter and the editor of edibleASPEN magazine.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeBlog Post2014/05/25 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe National Park Service's diversity problemhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/jodi-peterson-on-diversity-in-the-national-park-service
KDNK Radio speaks with HCN about changing demographics.From Yosemite to Glacier National Park to the Harriet Tubman National Monument in Maryland, the 400 parks that make up the U.S. National Park system are supposed to be the shared heritage of all Americans. Yet as Jodi Peterson reports in the current issue of High Country News, the vast majority of people who visit national parks or work in the system are white. For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s collaboration with High Country News, Nelson Harvey spoke with Peterson about the National Park Service’s diversity problem.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesMultimediaAudio2014/05/20 15:15:00 GMT-6ArticleListen to HCN readers share horror storieshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/listen-to-hcn-readers-share-horror-stories
A KDNK Sounds of the High Country segment.Sometimes when you set off across the west in search of adventure, you find a bit more than you bargained for. For our recent Travel Issue, High Country News held a “Western Travel Horror Story” contest that prompted more than 50 readers to submit stories about trips in the west that went terribly—and hilariously—wrong.

For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK radio’s collaboration with High Country News, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey had three readers tell him their stories. He spoke to Will Toor about getting stripped of his dignity on a hitchhiking trip, to Sheyna Maytum about breaking down in the desert, and to Bruce Drogsvold about a tow truck driver who will live in infamy. Here are their stories.

Read many more of the travel horror stories submitted by High Country News readers, and listen to past episodes of Sounds of the High Country at kdnk.org, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.]]>No publisherCommunitiesMultimediaAudio2014/04/21 09:30:00 GMT-6ArticleKDNK Radio speaks with writer Sierra Crane-Murdochhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/kdnk-radio-speaks-with-sierra-crane-murdoch
Searching for answers in a Nevada town plagued by childhood cancer. In the current issue of High Country News, contributing editor Sierra Crane-Murdoch tells a sprawling tale of contamination, cancer and cover up as she tries to unravel the unsolved mystery of the Fallon, Nevada cancer cluster. For the latest edition of KDNK Radio's Sounds of the High Country, Nelson Harvey spoke with Murdoch about what she found.]]>No publisherCommunitiesMultimediaAudio2014/03/10 13:19:48 GMT-6ArticleKDNK Radio speaks with HCN reporter Kevin Taylorhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/kdnk-radio-speaks-with-hcn-reporter-kevin-taylor
Will an apple a day keep the food desert away?The number of community gardens in the U.S. has been growing in recent years as more people take an interest in producing at least some of their own food. Yet in some western communities, a new and radical approach to communal agriculture is taking root: the edible forest garden.

You can find past editions of Sounds of the High Country atkdnk.org, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. The current issue of High Country News—along with the chance to subscribe to the magazine—is at HCN.org.